by Sean Stewart
Like Rutger White, swinging gently, dead.
In the middle of my elation I was frozen by sudden dread. I stood unmoving in the white silence, feeling only blind, crazy fear. Everything in me screamed out to run, to escape, to hide, but still I stood, breathless, pulse racing, stone-cold and pale in White’s apartment. How close I felt to the Deacon now. O I had heard the call of Justice, all right. Some calls were better left unanswered. For the sake of my soul I would not look into the mirror my conclusions offered me. I should never, never have left Jim. I must not turn the last corner; I dared not face the monster waiting at the labyrinth’s heart.
But the die was cast. You have to follow a pattern out, right to the end.
Slowly I got control of myself; slowly the panic passed. I only had to linger one last day by the grave of Jonathan Mask, and then I would be free. One last duty to perform. After all, I couldn’t disappoint Vachon, could I? I joked to myself. I willed my lungs to breathe, deep slow breaths. I was fine. I would be. Fine.
Queen E was wide awake when I got in, and greeted me with a rare show of affection, twining herself against my legs like a hank of black velvet. I had recovered in the clean night air. “Guess what?” I ruffled the fur around her neck, then put out a dish of milk, white and cold, so she could celebrate the make of Mask’s killer with me. I fixed myself a cup of tea and watched the sun come up.
With a snap, the spoon I had been twisting sprang in two pieces. “Damn,” I swore—but looking at the halves in exasperation, it occurred to me that they were as fitting an omen as any for the conclusion of the case. I laughed and threw out the shards; the money I stood to get out of this make would pay for more than a few spoons.
In high good humour I sat through the early morning show on NT and watched the clock on their set inch slowly past the eight a.m. prayer break. Then I made my call.
“Hello?”
“God bless,” I said, almost as if I meant it.
There was a pause, then a fretful sigh. “Then you know.” I nodded.
“I was hoping to get just a little more work done before…Ah well. Would this evening suffice? I promise to come along quietly. I’ve been waiting for days now.”
“Sorry to be so slow.”
“Quite all right!”
We laughed. “Fine then. 7:30, same place?”
“Right. Until then. And—Godspeed.” The phone flickered out.
Afterwards I considered calling Jim, but the odds of waking him up were too great. So I stroked Queen E, undressed, and crawled into bed, intending for the first time in days to sleep the untroubled sleep of the righteous and the just.
And the evening and the morning
were the sixth day.
Eleven
Things are much the same at #206 except that a single powerful spotlight throws a disk of light into the middle of the stage, like a full moon against a circle of night. This time I’m tingling, wired on adrenalin and the hunt. And this time Mask’s murderer is waiting for me.
A few more props have come in, including a chair. Delaney is sitting at the desk, making script notations with the fabulous quill pen, a dim figure hidden behind a cone of light. The room is still but electric; tension plays beneath its skin like a knife-fighter’s muscles. My hands are in my pockets; my fingers are supple and sensitive. I walk cat-quiet, but by the time I reach the first row of seats I know he has perceived me, as I have perceived him.
The shaping is so high that his image shows up, scarlet and filiform, as if I were seeing in the infrared. The sound of a passing elevator rumbles like an omen through the dim room.
With unexpected firmness Delaney pushes his chair away from the desk and turns. Slacks, sensible loafers; red cardigan a splash of colour. “God bless.”
“Moriarty, I presume.”
“I have been waiting, Holmes.” His words are swallowed in the dazzling silence of the curtain of light. We stand in tableau. “Here we are,” he says at last, and the excitement clenches in my gut like a sudden fall. “May I ask how you figured out that I killed Jonathan Mask?”
I nod, seeing the twisted body, red, fire-lashed. The memory runs through me like a fever, a blush of weakness. “Celia didn’t have the guts, Tara didn’t want him dead, I didn’t think you were lying to me—but I knew that if anyone could fool me, it had to be you.” I laugh bitterly. “Shaper blind. I knew that shapers could go numb, become thrill-seekers. I should have seen that it had happened to you. Russian roulette is not a way to commit suicide if all you want is death; its beauty is in the risk, in the charge of fear. A normal who knew what I did about shapers would have suspected you at once. But as soon as I knew you were an empath, I refused to believe you could have killed him. After all, what would that say about me?”
Delaney nods.
“Then I thought of the way you let me know you were a shaper: too public. You signalled. You wanted me to know. Why? Because then I would think you incapable of the murder.”
Delaney sighs. “Yes, that’s right. I’m a director, not an actor.”
I can feel pinpricks of tension along my arms like a junkie’s needle-tracks. Director. How right that is. What had Vachon said? Every Delaney production crackling with tension, friends breaking up, affairs beginning, marriages crumbling. And behind it all, with a gentle word, a sympathetic glance, the director, drawing forth his performances. My flesh creeps as I remember him doing it right in front of me: “Celia, perhaps you should consider getting a lawyer before you say anything more.” Oh, the wicked man: poking the beast and living for its twitches.
“Another thing. You were aware of Mask’s electronic lifestyle. When one of the actors said his keyboard had been misbehaving, you assumed that he had fixed it. And yet later, you suggested that his death had been an accident, insisting that he had made some ignorant electronic error.”
“Yes, of course—careless mistake on my part.” (Why the spasm of excitement from Delaney? Why the strange expression: gentleness cut with an unsteady edge of hilarity?)
“I hated Mask without ever having met him; I hated even to read his books. I knew you must have felt the same way. But there I made a mistake: I let myself believe he was the Devil, when it was really you all along.”
“Oh no, Ms. Fletcher—I’m no devil, I assure you.” Blind cameras stare at us with dead eyes. Delaney sticks his hands back in his pockets and strolls out of the light to the edge of the stage. “I am God.”
Dancing tongues of crimson and blue: liquid fire—but still only half-seen, almost-felt; still opaque to me. Even charged as we both are, both are defending, keeping control, not allowing ourselves to be overcome. I’m reaching out for him like a blind woman in a trapped room.
“Directors and gods are put on this earth to make us transcend ourselves, Ms. Fletcher. Jonathan Mask was a challenge to my calling. The problem with Jon as an actor was that he would never quite commit, if you know what I mean. For the most part this did not matter; his impersonations were brilliant, and satisfied the age like no other.” Delaney’s voice is fuller, didactic. He stands straight and looks out over the edge of the stage into the darkness, as if the room were filled with freshmen. “They did not, however, satisfy me.”
He laughs, a small self-aware laugh. He may be the sanest man I have ever met. After the phone call I had expected—not collapse, but swift acceptance. Resignation. Why is he so confident? It grates against my expectations. “If you questioned the others then you will have asked about me. And I suspect that when you did, they told you I was a limited director, but my strength was in working with actors.”
“Yes.”
He nods, satisfied. “I’m good at it because I demand emotional honesty, Ms. Fletcher, and I know what it is from each person. Working with Jonathan always bothered me; I could not reach him. He didn’t resist me, not consciously. Jonathan came back to work with me on his own initiative several times. He knew he was an imposter; you can see it everywhere. He desperately wanted the sincerity he lacked. He
wanted someone to make him believe. He was one-sided, and he knew it, and he knew too that it was the only thing that kept him from greatness. Am I right?”
I think back again to the Memoirs, to Mask’s idea that love and reason drive the universe, to the belief, implicit in all his works, that one of them had failed in him. “He was pushing entirely from one direction,” Delaney continues, understanding my assent. “And while it gave him enormous power, it was like a single line; only when he ran right into that other, that thing that he was missing, would he create a performance that transcended the ordinary. Just as you need lines going in several directions to make a three-dimensional shape, you need to work from several angles to sculpt a three-dimensional character. Otherwise you are line-drawing, nothing more.
“Jonathan was trying harder and harder as the years went by. Facing the prospect of a life finally alone, he began to see how badly he had trapped himself. He needed me to help him escape himself. There was a desperation creeping into his roles. His could have been a tremendous, haunting Mephistophilis.” Delaney sighs, and the conversation dwindles into the faint electric hum of the spotlight, the silence of hard-edged shadows.
Dark swathes of thought from Delaney are clouding the atmosphere, blunting my intuition. I feel confusion, a fevered wrongness. The heat from the spotlight is stifling; it’s hard to breathe. I want to end things. “And the murder?”
“Hm. The—murder.” He stumbles over the word, as if speaking in a foreign tongue. He shrugs. “What is there to relate? I came in early in the morning and went directly to the booth. As shooting time approached I wanted to take off my coat, get a cup of coffee from the costume room and make sure Tara and the camera-men were ready. Backstage there was nobody in sight; I saw the door of the women’s washroom swing closed as I turned the corner. It was a chaining of chance events: I started to take off my coat, I felt the weight of the taser in my pocket, and my eyes fell on the star on Jon’s dressing room door.
“The pattern fell in place like a mosaic: one instant random flakes of colour, the next a picture set in rock. I realized I could scare Jon badly. Force him to some real feeling.”
Delaney steps forward and faces the stage, turning his back on the empty seats.
The murderer opens the door, stage left, and steps in. Jonathan turns to complain but falls silent. Even then he knows what is coming.
He says, “Hello, David.” It’s unusual; he rarely uses the first name. The murderer is wearing gloves. He holds the victim’s eyes as he draws the taser from his pocket.
My every nerve is quivering as Delaney raises his hand, but he holds only air.
He says, “I’m going to kill you, Jonathan. The suit will overload. Nobody will ever know I did it. Except me.”
Mask tries to calm him down, talking very softly and not making any sudden movements. At the same time he is slowly trying to take off the costume. He is handling it all very well, but there is terror in him.
“A terror, Diane, that would make you sick, if you were in the audience…”
When Jonathan takes off the hellish mask and reveals his face, the last of his courage leaves him. He is crying. The killer tells him he’ll shoot if he makes any sound, and lowers the taser.
Mask is shaking and crying still. He has broken through himself at last to a genuine feeling, to raw, naked fear. He thanks his murderer.
And then he starts to talk. “I never want to play that scene again,” he says, with a shuddering laugh. Already he is recrystallizing. It has not been enough. Already the glass is filming over his eyes, they are going hard and glittery. He is analyzing his fear. “No Jon,” the murderer says bitterly, knowing he has failed. “We have to go all the way.” Mask starts to laugh, then stops. He says he doesn’t want to do it anymore. The director tells him it’s too late.
Delaney turns to face me at last and shrugs, suddenly straight forward. “And then I shot him.”
The devil’s eyes thankful, his hands clasped in gratitude. He takes a shuddering breath. Made great within his armor of chrome and crimson, he shrugs massive shoulders, begins to laugh; the flame within flutters, recovers, steadies.
Then the last understanding. He begins to beg; his hands scramble across the suit like maddened spiders. Too slow. He tears off only the mask. Trapped within his demon greatness still, the arc of unbearable brightness catches him around the chest. A play of incandescence, a moment of agony and fear, his last and only passion. His arms fling out, his body flies back, convulsed, and then falls into a smoldering, lifeless cross.
Delaney’s shoulders drop. “I left the taser in his hand, to suggest a suicide. That was as true as anything.”
God I hate him. To kill a man with your bare hands, to feel his death singing through you…
I try to free myself from his story. Beneath his resignation, something different, unexpected. Like…? I had been so sure he would come quietly—I could feel that he was looking for a fall. But now this strange, disturbing confidence. That mocking, self-deprecating tone, the gentle discouragement, and beneath it all the excitement, the sense of victory.
I am right to be afraid.
Calmness. Scheming hadn’t saved Rutger White. It won’t save Delaney either.
“The other reason I hated Jonathan (though hate is the wrong word) was that I was becoming like him. Perhaps it has never happened to you, but I was becoming—anaesthetized.” This time Delaney’s voice is simple, and he addresses me directly. “The feeling was draining away, the flux and movement of things…All going, going.”
“I know,” I whisper.
“I was sure you had felt the greyness coming for you, Ms. Fletcher; I touched the dead spots in you.”
“I hate you.”
Carefully. “I know…exactly how you feel about me, Diane.”
His tongue on my first name is obscene.
“That was the temptation. Could I do it? Could I be there, right at the end, completely open…?” He shudders. “I didn’t think so, not until it was really over. I went back to the booth and sat there until someone came to get me. By the time the police arrived the backlash had set in, and I was as flat as I had ever been.” He hid his eyes behind his hand. When he looked up, his face was torn between agony and joy; the expression of a saint at the moment of his martyrdom. “But at the centre, the instant when my finger was tightening and Jon broke through all his games and looked at death: he was looking at me. He was me.” David speaks gently, with the voice of religious transport. “I killed myself, Ms. Fletcher. I set one foot upon the undiscovered country from whose bourn no traveller returns.”
I have to project: cold and implacable. There must be no question that I will take him in. He is an empath too; I must play on him, make him feel the certainty of his arrest.
“Please raise your hands,” I say, hopping onto the stage and searching him. I slap down his sides without finding anything. There is a push of excitement, unbalancing me as if a trapdoor had suddenly gaped beneath my feet.
He shakes his head. “I wonder. Did you bring a back-up?” I cover my consternation almost instantly, but with another empath it isn’t fast enough. He smiles. “Well then,” he continues briskly, “nobody else has heard my eloquent confession. Even if you had a corder, it would be inadmissible in court. In short, you really haven’t enough hard evidence to arrest me. And it would have to be very good evidence.”
The trap is revealed and I realize he is right. The government doesn’t want to know, won’t want to know. Another good Red down, another scandal…Unlike the White case I don’t have the testimony of a witness to back me up. I hadn’t expected any resistance. There is a sick falling feeling in my stomach, but I won’t let it take me out. I didn’t make my reputation by panicking. “I don’t need witnesses, David. The tangs on your taser will show microparticles from Jon’s costume…Look, what good is it to do something stupid now? Who knows—maybe you can get off on an insanity plea.”
He looks at me, puzzled by my stupidity. “
I don’t want to get off, Diane. You know that.”
I do, but I’ll try anything to get him in peacefully. “Fine. If you want to go, turn yourself in and let the hangman have his day. That way your ends and the ends of public justice will both be served.”
He frowns. “I don’t think so. I doubt hangmen feel their murders keenly enough.”
I feel the rough edge of panic inside. How can I stop his game? Every moment passes like another step into the labyrinth, drawn to the monster at the center of the maze. I can’t let my panic show. Must convince David.
“Perhaps you are right,” he says with a sigh, “though my taser has unaccountably disappeared. I know you haven’t got it, Diane. Whoever took it had far too much time to dispose of it before you thought to confiscate them.” One step closer. “Even I had time to go out and buy another, second-hand. That was a stroke of luck; it was only after you saw us all that I realized how rash I had been to leave the weapon behind. A typical problem; my aesthetics outweighed more practical concerns.”
His long fingers flick with distaste. “No, I don’t think jail will do, really. The waiting would be unbearable.” A sudden stab of red flame, the straining fire-shot blue of him, all leaning angles and shattered lines that wrench and buckle with desperate anticipation. “The waiting is the worst.”
He smiles, but his pale eyes are fierce. “Did you know you could actually die of boredom?”
What if he wants to take me with him? Could there be a bomb in one of the books, the lights?
“And I think, Ms. Fletcher, you err in assuming that my ends, as well as those of Justice, would be well-served by a confession.” I scan the dim room, wondering if death waits for me in a sudden burst of light. The danger is opening me against my will. I feel life twisting through me like a stream bucking spring ice.
Alone and dueling at the top of the city. And the Devil took him to the highest tower in Jerusalem. The day is hot and clear, but the eyes of Christ are cold. “…dash your foot against a stone,” his companion is saying. The words of our Lord in red. And the Devil’s charred red hands, stinking with an ageless unbearable torment. The two of them, exiled from Heaven, lords of the earth, binder and looser, alpha and omega. “Most dearly loved of God.”